Just the words.

Excerpts from key projects

I'm a writer because my curious nature drives me to learn about a lot of different subjects. I've always thought that actors inhabit their varied roles to see what it feels like to be someone else. I write because I can discover knowledge. And I've been fortunate to work in many different industries and love immersing myself in the stories and information from those industries.

I love talking to clients and any other stakeholders in a company or associated with a project to discover the story that needs to be told.

And in prospecting for those stories, I've learned a lot about the world. That's why I write.

In these sections, you'll find excerpts from key projects. After reviewing these excerpts I'm ready to talk to you about how I can discover your story and tell the world about it.

Fortune 100 annual reports

Marketing collateral

University magazines

Catalog copywriting

Press releases

Newsletters

Collaborative writing projects

Direct mail copy

Annual Reports

Pepperdine University

In 1937, 167 students from 22 states and two foreign countries came to California to attend George Pepperdine College and found the concrete still a bit wet at 79th Street and Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles.

The college’s founder, George Pepperdine, and his wife, Helen, were not fazed—they merely registered the group in the William Penn Hotel and arranged for the city’s bright red trolley cars to transport the students on a one-week tour of the museums and other cultural places of interest in Los Angeles.

A bit of wet concrete was no match for a man who started life in a one-room cabin in Kansas in 1886 and who used the wealth he accrued through many years of longer hours and determined work to build a college…

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On September 6, 1972, approximately 916 students set their eyes on Pepperdine University’s newest campus. This founding student body at Malibu had the highest Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of any class enrolled at Pepperdine with 20 percent of the freshman class in the 93rd percentile nationwide. The grade-point average of the freshman class was 3.08 with 20 percent earning a 3.5.
The students saw what appeared to be a Mediterranean hill town nestled among the rugged Santa Monica Mountains with a striking view of the Pacific Ocean—the “Waves” had found another home—the Malibu.

The Malibu opening paralleled the beginnings of the original campus although there was no need for trolley cars. The main parking lot had been paved only the day before and the electricity was turned on at 4 p.m. that day…

Annual Reports

Litton

The application of the modern computer has revolutionized many areas of science and technology. Nowhere, perhaps, is this truer than in geophysical research and seismic exploration.

A half-century ago, seismic recordings were cranked by hand through a camera-like device. Inside the camera, “harp” wires, vibrated by vacuum-tube amplifiers that transmitted seismic signals, created white traces of squiggly lines on photographic paper…In the 1920s the first “well in the water” was sunk in Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo in water just knee deep and six feet from shore.

Now about 60 years later, an oil platform off the Gulf of Mexico is producing in 1,025 feet of water and a drilling ship has operated in 5,624 feet of water in the Mediterranean off the coast of France.

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As oil-drilling technology breaks through barriers it expands the market for energy surveys at sea. At the same time, it challenges survey technology. Clients of Litton’s Western Geophysical division will not sink a well in 1,000 feet of water without a comprehensive and detailed picture of what is underneath the ocean floor—an image that requires masses of information to be gathered, processed and interpreted…

Annual Reports

Integra Realty

Information is a valuable commodity, if you can interpret it and gain useful knowledge from it. We live in an age with easy access to a bounty of information about the real estate investment world. However, raw data without astute analysis doesn’t add any value to the decision-making process.

The complexities of real estate investing require skilled assessment of several factors. In this section, we will focus on several fundamental components that drive real estate demand: population, household growth, income, and employment growth. IRR suggests analyzing these key indices when considering trends in a specific MSA. Objective analysis of these demand indices is crucial in designing a profitable risk-reward scenario….

San Diego’s leaders didn’t flinch when their community was hit hard with defense cutbacks that severely weakened the aerospace and supplier industries in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their resilient efforts have resulted in a case study of how to revive a faltering city. Less than a decade after the major setbacks, San Diego has replaced all of the lost jobs with new jobs in different businesses, such as business services, high-technology clusters and tourism….

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A significant call center hub, Dallas is also strongly entrenched in the telecommunications industry and has a very diversified high-technology employment base. More than 600 high-technology companies operate along the Telecom Corridor®, and by 2010, it is predicted these companies will add 40,000 jobs to the Dallas area. The largest grouping of telecommunications firms in the United States are strung along this corridor along State Highway 190 and the U.s. 75 in the Dallas suburb of Richardson…

Keeping up with 76 million baby boomers as they become empty nesters, retire, and grow older could get interesting. This demographic engine is already moving down the runway ready for takeoff. Again, they choose not to take the paths most often taken in the past and are determined not to give up the “rock and roll” of life. This group is a moving target since baby boomers aren’t particularly homogenous. Geezer is not in their vocabulary. They worked hard and continue to play harder than ever. Their home-buying trends are all over the place, to active-adult communities, to amenity-rich condominium apartments, to bigger suburban single-family homes to planned communities.